Real time... and ordinary time

 

 Marie Howe on "On Being" with Krista Tippett  "The Power of Words to Save Us"

Ms. Tippett:

MH: What about — I just heard you use that term, “real time.” Real time is a new invented phrase.

MH: Yeah. “Real time.” It’s true. There’s this redundancy, I mean, that’s happening now. These are great questions. I think that many of us are used to being in several places at once and in several time zones at once. I mean that’s just how we live now.

KT: I also think real time is a way we talk about the news cycle, things happening in real time. But that’s also stuff we need to shield ourselves from, right? It’s not as — I don’t know. Is real time as real as ordinary time? I mean real time is pervasive, and it’s distracting.

Ms. Howe:MH: Well, so many thoughts at once. Ordinary time originally meant to me when I would go through the missal when I was a kid. Remember, those swaths of time between high holy seasons was ordinary time.

And there was always coming, the coming of ordinary time, the coming of ordinary time, the coming of — and then first Sunday of ordinary time, second Sunday of ordinary time. I remember just thinking what a strange and wonderful way of talking about everyday life. And so this notion of when nothing dramatic is happening, but this is where we’re living. It’s not Easter. It’s not Christmas. It’s not Lent. It’s not Advent.

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Also in this episode other idea of "ordinary time":

But what I want is to try to make poetry as ubiquitous as Gap ads. I mean how can we have people bump into poetry? I mean, there’s this guy in New York. I say it’s a guy. It could be a woman. Last spring, there was somebody who was drawing on the sidewalk in blue chalk, and all it said was “happiness,” a big “happiness” with a big blue arrow this way. And I would see these around, and I thought, “This is terrific. This is really kind of wonderful. Like, ‘happiness’ is this way, that way.”

And then one day, I was waiting for my daughter and her friends to get off one bus, and we were going to get on another. And there was the big blue chalk, and it said “happiness.” And then there was a big circle drawn on the sidewalk and it said “here.” And everybody who walked by stood in the circle.

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Marie Howe has just published a new book, Magdalene, around the poem she first read aloud for us in this show. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and is the former poet laureate of New York. Her previous poetry collections include What the Living Do, The Good Thief, and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.